Below is my master's proposal submitted on the 10th of February. The proposal itself was approved on the 27th of February, however, my scholarship applications were declined on the 9th of March due to the competitiveness of the limited number of scholarships. If this project interests you, then, could I ask for your support. Firstly, through prayer that God's will would be done; whether that means I obtain the funds or not. Secondly, through offering a financial contribution on my Give A Little Page (). Thirdly, through promoting my Give A Little page on social media or through emailing relevant and/or potential contacts. (Please note that this proposal is my own intellectual property, so do not reproduce the content below without contacting me for my permission.)
Proposal for Masters Research in Christian Thought and
History
My research will bring the work of
William T. Cavanaugh on Eucharistic theology, nonviolence, and radical
democratic theory into dialogue with Judith Butler’s work on performativity,
radical democratic politics, and her ethics on precarity.
The church has been integral to
Cavanaugh’s political theology since his first monograph – “Torture and the
Eucharist” (1998). The book gave him public acclaim as he identified how
torture and the Eucharist were the corresponding liturgies of two competing
political bodies: the state of Chile under Pinochet and the Roman Catholic Church.
One of Cavanaugh’s central influences is the late Catholic theologian, Henri de
Lubac. de Lubac’s discovery and dictum in Corpus
Mysticum (1944) is that “the Eucharist makes the church,” a revelation that
is essential to Cavanaugh’s thought. In de Lubac’s work, he elaborates how the
Eucharist and the church as a dyad were referred to as a “communio,” which paired together forming the contemporary
performance of Christ’s history body. Consequently, Christians were Jesus’ real
body while the Eucharist was where the Body of Christ
mysteriously came to exist. Cavanaugh explains that “[t]he church and
the Eucharist form the liturgical pair of visible community (corpus verum) and the invisible action
or mystery (corpus mysticum) which
together re-present and re-remember Christ’s historical body.” Cavanaugh poetically summarises this reality, noting that “the church does not
simply perform the Eucharist; the Eucharist performs the church.” The Eucharist makes the Body of Christ, the true, “sui generis” social
body.”
Cavanaugh asserts that the practice
of Eucharist is what makes the church a political body and is not to be merely
tacked onto politics and political issues. For the practices of Eucharist and torture alike use “bodies to mediate a
particular political performance, an “act of symbolization” that [effects] a
“relation of places” among subjects.” These symbolic acts, Cavanaugh claims, reorganise public space through ritual
practices scripting bodies into a performance. For political power is realised when individual bodies work together in concert
to tell a narrative that configures them in space and time as a political body. “These narratives are told through ritual action; the ordering of the body
politic is largely realized through public ritual actions through which the
roles and boundaries and goals and allegiances of the body are enacted and
reinforced.” The
public performance of the Eucharist, then, is political, such that Cavanaugh
calls it “an authoritative touchstone for configuring bodies in space and
time.” Thus, when the church puts bodies on the street in public protest it claims the
right to configure space and time in a way that challenges rather than
reinforces the nation-states performance and associated narratival rituals.
Judith Butler arguably came to public acclaim and notoriety through her work on gender performativity which was brought to the fore in her book, Gender Trouble (1990). In her preface to the 1999 edition of the text, she notes the difficulty of giving a precise definition of performativity. Firstly, because of how others have used the term over time. Secondly, because her understanding of the term has had to have been clarified and revised predominantly due to others critical feedback as well as through her own social and political engagements. Butler explains that, firstly,
Judith Butler arguably came to public acclaim and notoriety through her work on gender performativity which was brought to the fore in her book, Gender Trouble (1990). In her preface to the 1999 edition of the text, she notes the difficulty of giving a precise definition of performativity. Firstly, because of how others have used the term over time. Secondly, because her understanding of the term has had to have been clarified and revised predominantly due to others critical feedback as well as through her own social and political engagements. Butler explains that, firstly,
the performativity of gender
revolves around this metalepsis, the way in which the anticipation of a
gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself. Secondly,
performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which
achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body,
understood in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration.
While gender has been central to Butler’s theorising of
performativity, her later works, such as Excitable
Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), have
expanded the scope of performativity beyond gender. Essential to both of these
is how a speech act can involve both “linguistic performativity” and “bodily
performativity.” For Butler, these forms intersect and consequently are not wholly
distinct, nor identical. In Excitable
Speech, Butler explored how a speech act can simultaneously be “performed”
and “linguistic” because “speech itself is a bodily act with specific
linguistic consequences. Thus speech belongs exclusively to neither corporeal
presentation nor to language, and its status as word and deed is necessarily
ambiguous.”
The evolution of Butler’s thought
has led to her rejecting liberal individualisms understanding of performativity
favouring instead a relational ontology that acknowledges the “relation between
us.” She instead appeals to how our performative existence as social beings
offers opportunities for coordinated action in concert where the “condition and
aim is the reconstitution of plural forms of agency and social practices of resistances.” She notes that “[t]he specific thesis of [Notes
Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly] is that acting in concert can be
an embodied form of calling into question the inchoate and powerful dimensions
of reigning notions of the political.” There are then strong similarities between Butler and Cavanaugh. Firstly,
through Cavanaugh perceiving that public demonstrations “claim the right to be
here” and Butler’s similar assertion that such demonstrations exercise a
“plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the
body in the midst of the political field”. Secondly, through Cavanaugh’s understanding of the potential of a body politic
to engage together in the rituals of a different story in a performance that
reconfigures space and time. Butler, in comparison, emphatically points out that in public protest the
exercising of “assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space
and produce, or reproduce, the public character of the material environment”
through either contestation or conformity. The reconfiguring or the creation of space and location through action in
concert is tied to her relational ontology of there being a relation between
us. For in political protest, the plural and performative action is more than
an aggregation of solitary individuals. In contrast, this “happens only
“between” bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and
another’s...Indeed, the action emerges from the “between,” a spatial figure for
a relation that both and differentiates.” Cavanaugh’s understanding of the performance of the Eucharist making the church
has similar resonances to how Butler conceptualises bodies in concert creating
a new social body.
Butler and Cavanaugh’s pursuit of
political social bodies other than the state leads to them both finding fault
with nationalism. For Cavanaugh “nationalism demands simple space that only the
state sovereign can provide.” Simple space describes the direct relationship between sovereign and
individuals that has arisen with the ascendancy of the nation-state at the
expense of the complex space of overlapping loyalties and authorities in
medieval society.” Thus, he can claim that “[t]he main conflict of modern politics is not state
versus individual, but state versus intermediate social group.” The Cavanaugh calls for the complexifying of political space through the
adoption of an imagination that refuses the relegation of social bodies to the
role of mediating between the two poles of state and individual. There is, then, an important task of creating the more complex political space
of radical democracy through “[creating] forms of local and translocal
community that disperse and resist the powers invested in the state and
corporation.” Butler’s similar vision problematises nationalism for how it selectively
produces and sustains a particular understanding of the subject. Nationalism’s conception
of the subject delimits political dependency and obligations to the
nation-state in contrast to her calls for the recognition of our radical
interdependence on one other and the translation of this principle into a
pursuit of global cohabitation.
Essential to Butler’s relational
ethic is our shared corporeal vulnerability – “precariousness” – which
demonstrates a “social ontology” instead of a liberal individualistic ontology.
Our social ontology demands conditions that sustain social life; conditions
that testify to and rely on interdependency. Understanding our fundamental interconnectedness can be aided through the
concepts of “precarity” and “precariousness.” Precarity
designates that politically induced
condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic
networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury,
violence, and death…precarity is thus the differential distribution of
precariousness.”
For Butler ethics and politics intersect on this point as
each of us is constituted
politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies – as a
site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once
assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being
socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of violence by virtue
of that exposure.
Life is inevitably and
necessarily lived in “unwilled proximity and interdependency” a phrase that she
uses repeatedly to demonstrate how we are bound to each other. Thus, the ““I” is invariably implicated in the “we.””
Cavanaugh acknowledges a similar social bond,
observing that the horror of torture is intensified through the awareness that
the violent act “is being done to me by
another human being. It is a perversion and destruction of the very idea of
human relationship.” Cavanaugh rejects any possibility of the church using violence since ecclesial history
testifies to the fact that the church cannot exercise violence rightly. Cavanaugh here has appropriated Dorothy Day’s position on nonviolence. He
argues that the boundaries of the visible church today are not the same as the
eschatological body of Christ. This means that Day can posit that all human
beings are potential members of the Body of Christ and thus we cannot inflict
violence on another without risking hurting one of our own members. This principle of the mystical body of Christ acknowledges the communicability
of pain as well as of guilt. Day’s premise is that not only pain is shared amongst
the Body of Christ but also that guilt is shared in the body through violent
acts committed and from corresponding sins of omission for failing to prevent
or protest against violence. Cavanaugh, consequently, claims that “[t]he eucharist produces a radical
identification of three terms: Christ, those who suffer, and me (cf. Matt.
25:31-46).” Thus,
just as Butler’s social ontology of shared vulnerability starts collapsing
distinctions between “self” and “other” so does the reality of the mystical
body of Christ.
For Butler,
our shared precarious existence can unite us despite our differences through all
living creatures being implicated by vulnerability. For Butler acknowledging how all of life experiences precariousness, while acknowledging
that precarity differentially allocates precariousness, offers a potential
“basis for claiming the equal value of lives.” The social ontology that recognises our equal need for conditions suitable for
our survival requires an ethic of social responsibility for sustaining,
safeguarding, and advancing more egalitarian conditions. Consequently, rethinking our bodily ontology enables us to rethink politics
through the formation of coalitions based on the promotion of conditions that
address precarity instead of on identity politics. Such precarity-based-alliances can appeal to the “right to life” or in the case of the stateless who are fully politically disenfranchised, “the right to have rights.” Butler envisions these coalitions should operate despite “ongoing antagonisms”
among groups and participants. These differences are invaluable to her because
she perceives these “persistent and animating differences as the sign and
substance of radical democratic politics.” This would outwork her claim that “[e]quality is a condition and character of
political action itself at the same time that it is its goal.” Thus, the pursuit of conditions suitable for a shared but vulnerable life
should be found in a political body outside of the simple space of state and
individual. Given that in Torture and the
Eucharist Cavanaugh devotes his final chapter – “Performing the Body of
Christ” – to elaborating three examples to develop a “Eucharistic imagination
of resistance to state discipline,” I think there is potential for Butler’s
understanding of performative and plural political action on the basis of
precarity to inform his “Eucharistic counter-politics.”
Therefore,
this preliminary sketch of the work of Butler and Cavanaugh shows potential for
refining political theological thought on nonviolence, radical democracy, and
the performative nature of political bodies’ practices, especially the church
and nation-state. I think that an engagement between these two scholars on
practices of resistance to state violence is relevant to today’s world. A world
where identity politics has been appropriated by white groups, like the alt-right
in America. A world where autarkic and isolationist tendencies are growing in
popularity at the expense of globalisation, as seen with Brexit in the United
Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in America. A world where fear is
threatening diplomacy and humanitarian aid, as seen by the controversial
responses to the worst refugee crisis since World War II. A world where ending
war and terrorism is still about killing all the right people. In this current political climate, pioneering
interdisciplinary work that brings together surprising and seemingly
incompatible interlocutors is part of the pursuit of radical democracy.
Chapter Break Down
and Titles:
1.
Butler’s Solution to Precariousness, Precarity,
and Dispossession: Radical Democratic Alliances
2.
Cavanaugh’s Politics: The Radical Democracy of
the Eucharist
3.
Butler’s Conception of Religion
4.
Religion in Cavanaugh’s Writings:
Constructivist, Functionalist, or Substantivist?
5.
The Shift of the Performative in Butler’s Works
6.
The Nature of the Eucharist: Performative,
Performance or Both?
